The Apostle Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh’ is often used as an excuse for believers to quit on God. Some scholars claim Paul’s thorn was a metaphor for going blind because he mentions writing ‘large letters’ (Gal 6:11). But what if the answer to the mysterious riddle of Paul’s ‘thorn’ is found within the text itself? Did he suffer greater persecution because of the visions and revelations he received from the Lord, which he described as his ‘thorn in the flesh’? In this final broadcast, Carl shares a word study on ‘suffering,’ and how it sometimes refers to persecution instead…
Here is a complete transcript of the broadcast (below)…
Friend, my job as a pastor is to speak the truth in love, and whenever the truth is spoken, it brings freedom from bondage. And friend, we’re talking about some of the hindrances today that could impede your healing, and a thorn in the flesh is one of them. But we’re going to look at the scripture in detail and outline that it is not a physical ailment, but that it actually was a messenger from Satan sent to ‘buffet’ Paul. We are breaking down some of the religious excuses for not believing God, and the thorn in the flesh is a crutch for some people. We’re going to pick it up now in part three, our final part of The Authority of the Believer live in session. Well, Paul had a thorn, you know, he had bad eyesight. The thorn in the flesh is my issue.
I’m going to keep this sickness because God is teaching me something, etc. Friend, I’m trying to bring liberty and freedom tonight, not religion. That’s my purpose. In 2 Corinthians 12:7, “lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to Buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure.” Paul had tremendous revelations. He met the Lord on the road to Damascus one-on-one. Arguably, he went to heaven also. Many contend or scholars contend he actually went to heaven in a vision. But because of this, the messenger of Satan was sent to Buffet him.
That is not buffet. One guy said, hey, I’m going to go to, yeah, I’m going to go to Luby’s and Satan’s going to buffet me. The word there for messenger is Angelos. Does that sound familiar? Angelos, angel. So, it was a messenger. It was a metaphor. The thorn in the flesh was a pain in the neck. That person’s a pain in the neck. That’s a thorn in the flesh, etc. It’s the same usage. It’s the same usage of the Old Testament. The thorns in the sides of Israel, Numbers 13, Joshua 23, right? Snares and traps, grasshoppers, thorns in their eyes, thorns of the wilderness, thorn in the flesh. Another euphemism, another metaphor for something working against me. Some people say I have a thorn in the flesh.
Brother or sister, if you’ve seen the Lord in an open vision, if you’ve been to heaven and you’ve written two-thirds of the New Testament, you qualify. But you don’t qualify, all right? So, if you think you’ve got a thorn in the flesh, lay it aside tonight, all right? Because the power of agreement is very powerful, isn’t it? If you start agreeing that God is doing something and that’s what you believe, but it’s in error, the power of agreement will make it binding to you. Doubt is not knowing, but unbelief is knowing and choosing not to believe, and there’s a difference. If we give you more information, you’ll know the truth, but then you have to choose to believe it, and there’s a difference there as well, right? Some people are ignorant because they’ve never heard the truth. Some people have heard the truth and they haven’t applied it. It could be the case of authority, right? Maybe we’re going to have an opportunity to apply our authority.
Galatians 4:15, “where is then the blessedness you speak of? For I bear you record that if it had been possible, you would have plucked out your own eyes and have given them to me,” right? He is saying, you’re such a loving person that you would have given me your own eyes, okay? It’s a figure of speech. In Galatians 6:11, it says, “you see how large a letter I have written unto you in my own hand.” So, you’re thinking, wow, he’s writing large letters because he’s nearly blind. That word is ‘gramma,’ which is epistle, book, bill, or document. If you look at Galatians, it was a very long epistle. It was longer than seven of Paul’s epistles and as long as two others. In many manuscripts, Hebrews was attached to Galatians. And if that were the case, it would have been the largest letter he would have ever written. Now, there are people who teach that Paul was nearly blind and that was his thorn. There are people who teach that his thorn was sickness or blindness or whatever else. No, no, I don’t believe that, friend. After doing some research here, we must submit to God and resist the devil.
Does pastor understand everything? No, he does not, okay? I stand before you right now. Do I understand it all? No, but I study to show myself approved. And that’s what we’ve got to do, right? If the enemy can get you to take on something that you believe is from God, you’re not going to resist it. And that is the trick of the enemy. If you don’t resist it, right? Submit to God and resist the devil. Some people are going the wrong way around. They’re submitting to the devil and resisting God, right? We don’t want to do that. Could we neglect our salvation through ignorance? How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation, which at first began to be spoken by the Lord and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him? If you’ve heard the gospel, you’ve accepted it. Praise God. Everybody here, I presume, has accepted the gospel. You could be neglecting, however, some of the aspects of the gospel, which could be your authority in Christ, which could be standing on the provision of atonement for healing, for example. We don’t want to neglect any of the presents under the Christmas tree, right? That’s why at two in the morning, at 42 years of age, I’m standing there by the Christmas tree. No, maybe not. But when I was seven or eight, I mean, I was still up till maybe 10 o’clock. Wow. But the point is, we want to get all those presents. We don’t want to neglect anything. Let’s talk about suffering real quick.
Jesus suffered in his physical body on the cross. He became sin for us, that we might access the provision of healing. It says in 2 Timothy 2:12, “if we suffer, we shall also reign with him. If we deny him, he shall also deny us.” But if you look at that word, suffer, five, two, seven, eight in the Greek, hypomeno is, ‘to stay under, to remain, to bear, to have fortitude, to persevere, to endure, to abide, to be patient.’ Okay? By his stripes, we are healed. We’re not suffering in physical body. We stand on the promise of God. We resist the symptoms of sickness, and we claim that the healing that God has provided for us. Amen? The persecution you will feel is when you’re crazy enough to start a church in downtown Denver on a Wednesday night. Persecution. Amen? You’re actually going to do that, pastor? Are you out of your brain? In the middle of the week, you expect people to come? Amen? Some people came. The Greek meaning of crazy, of course, means obedient. Okay, so we have cause and effect. There are idioms and antonyms in the Old Testament, figures of speech. If I said, I’m under the weather, that’s an idiom. That topic is a hot potato. That is an idiom.
If I said to you, Washington DC, what does that mean to you? It means government, typically, right? If I said Westminster, to me, that would mean British government. One word having many meanings. These things are in the Old Testament as well, and we have to be careful with their usage, particularly when it says God killed or God smoked. Now, there’s an interesting observation in some cases between the active and passive tense of Old Testament texts, where God is allowing evil, but he’s not creating it. Remember what I said about Deuteronomy 28 and the storm warden? If you do this, you will be blessed. If you do this, you will be cursed. If they chose the curse, God allowed them to choose the curse, but he didn’t want them to, right? But he still honors our choice. Satan is the one who usurps us. He’s the one who oppresses us. God doesn’t do that. He allows us to choose. So, Robert E. Young, how many have heard of Young’s literal translation? If you read Hints to Bible Interpretation, Robert Young, who was a scholar in the Hebrew, said that when the King James translators translated the tenses of the verses, they had no corresponding permissive tense.
Okay, so what does that mean? It means instead of saying God allowed this, it said God did this. Instead of saying God allowed them to be killed because of their choice, it says God killed them. Okay, there’s a difference between the active and passive tense of the Old Testament. That’s what I’m trying to communicate. Because if you don’t understand that, there’s certain verses that really make out God to be kind of mean, and he’s going around killing animals, women, and children. Okay, but again, in that instance, they were idol-worshiping, they were sacrificing children. There’s some very dark things in the Old Testament. The point I’m trying to get across is the permissive and active tenses show God in the light that I believe is the way he should be presented, which is he honors our choices, right? It’s the same with the storm warden who said, hey, here’s the shelter. They all died of the tornado. Well, he allowed that to happen, right? But the way the King James would have written that is God killed them. He killed them in the storm. He allowed them to be killed in that instance.
I’m not saying that every single verse is like that, but I’m sharing some light on that for your understanding, all right? I found it very interesting when I studied it. So, what do we need to do? We need to submit to God and resist the devil, okay? Now, what does that mean? Who is the devil? I’ve never met him. Where does he live? Well, good question. It is the thoughts in the mind that are condemning, the thoughts that would try and bring you down to tell you you’re not good enough, to tell you you’ll never make it in this life, that you’ll never make friends, that you’ll always be sick, right? He uses absolutes, always, never, that kind of thing. The war friend is in our mind, right? That’s the battlefield. Joyce Meyer would say that. The battlefield is in the mind. It is our job as an occupying army to resist the thoughts that do not line up with God’s word. We need to take up our authority.
Some sickness can be demonic in origin. I’m not saying all of it is. I’m saying some of it could be. You need to speak to some things in your life and take authority over them. If you see reoccurring patterns happen in your family, like barrenness or marriage breakup or distancing and alienation of family members, there could be a work that you need to address because you’re the one with the authority, right? Jesus has already died on the cross. He’s seated at the right hand of the Father. He’s making intercession for you as you move in the authority he gave you. Can you see the consequences of not moving, right? There are consequences for not acting and not doing in this life. We need to pray. We need to read God’s word. We need to do the vacuuming. We need to do the washing up. We need to empty the cat litter, right? I didn’t put them on there, but we need to share Christ with other people when we can. We need to obey the Lord when he prompts us. We need to be quick to repent and quick to forgive, and we need to sow into the gospel. If we do our part, God will do his part. But if we don’t do our part, there can be consequences, right? Remember the ‘ifs.’ I’ve said all of this to say, friends, we have a part to play.
The thought that God is in control of everything and everything is going to work out hunky-dory and life’s great and I don’t really have to do anything is a lie. What is that saying? When good men do nothing, evil propagates or evil expands when good men do nothing. At the next family gathering, the Holy Spirit might prompt you to speak to a relative or a friend and say, you know what? That person’s struggling right now. You need to go up and talk to them or at least encourage them. Maybe pray for them. Last week, we talked about God wants to communicate. You could have a word of knowledge or a word of wisdom for that person. In 2006, I was standing right here doing a teaching, and there’s a guy sitting right here. I’m just talking like this the whole time, just as I am right now. The Holy Spirit’s going, that guy’s going to do something bad tonight. He’s going to do something bad to himself. It just kept coming up. It kept coming up, repeating, and repeating. I said, brother, don’t do it. I just said that right now. Don’t do it, brother. Now, he looked at me like I just, you know, was like, whatever. Afterwards, he told me he was going to hang himself that night. That’s a word of knowledge that can save a person’s life. That’s an extreme example. That’s never happened to me again. It may never happen again. I pray not. The point is that the word that the Holy Spirit gives you can be life-changing.
We need to be open to that, open to the gifts of the Spirit as well. If you’ve had a prompting in your heart to be doing something many times, and the Holy Spirit has told you, like nagging you, you need to do this, you need to do this, there’s a consequence for not doing it. There’s a blessing for doing it as well. God’s a God of second chances and third chances, certainly, but I’m not getting any younger. Right? Nobody’s getting any younger in this room, unless they’re Benjamin Button, whoever he is. So, now is the time, friends. Now is the time. We’re responsible for the word, we’re responsible for our thoughts, we’re responsible for our actions, we’re responsible for our choices, and it’s not about not having fun. Now he says that. It’s not about not having fun. Have fun, kids. No. The Holy Spirit is a friend. Jesus is a friend to us, okay? Until tomorrow, friends. Good night, God bless, and remember to spread the good news.
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